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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Moment 112 - Want to sleep better? Listen to this: Matthew Walker
Moment 112 - Want to sleep better? Listen to this: Matthew Walker

Moment 112 - Want to sleep better? Listen to this: Matthew Walker

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven BartlettGo to Podcast Page

Matthew Walker, Steven Bartlett
·
6 Clips
·
Jun 2, 2023
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Episode Summary
Episode Transcript
0:03
My question is, what are the things that?
0:06
In the modern society are standing in the way of sleep, we've touched on some of them Loosely, but some of the, like, big obvious things, the things that you would suggest doing very actionable things, we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy deep sleep, that we need to be optimal in every regard of our health and performance. There's probably, I think, five standard tips, what we call, sort of sleep, hygiene that you can do, and then I'll come on to, maybe it's just some unconventional tips that we've
0:36
Sort of touched on. And we've spoken about many of these, the first thing I would recommend people to do and this is why when some people say how, what about this new sleep supplement or are you know, it's 40 quid for this bottle of these deeper, new Sleek natural medications. I'm going to give it a try. I would say try these tried and true things. First before you spend your money on supplements, the first thing is regularity, go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. No matter whether it's the week day or the weekend, your brain,
1:06
Regularity thrives best in the conditions of regularity. When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep. The second thing is get some Darkness at night as I said, we don't get enough darkness in the modern world and so the trick I would offer and I don't use it. I don't like the word hack but there's sort of suggestion would be in the last hour before bed. Try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week.
1:36
Dim down half of the light source, which off, half of lights, or even a quote, 3/4 of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed, all of the lights and every room in all of the rooms, you know, switch off, almost all of the light. Now I'm not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness and the last Allison. I don't wanna say, just dimmed out switch off, half of the lights. You will be surprised at how sleepy that Darkness will make you feel and it's also an incredible.
2:06
Behavioral trigger to signal to your brain. That it is time for sleep. That darkness is around me. That's the second tip is Darkness, the third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bed room, temperature that is too high and you need to aim for bed room. Temperature of about eighteen eighteen, and a half degrees Celsius around about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. If I'm probably
2:36
butchering the mathematics there on that, but you need to get cool. Now, you can were thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle that's fine. But the ambient needs to be cold because you need to drop your core body, temperature and your brain temperature by about 1 degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep and it's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold and too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like cave, the the for
3:06
Question would be what we've got. Fourth suggestion would be Walk It Out and we've spoken about this the 30 minute rule, you know, get up do something different or meditate don't lie in bed awake for too long then the final two things we've spoken about. Well we spoke about caffeine, we haven't spoken about alcohol, but let me just say, is that in kind of headline of, it alcohol is not a sleep aid. Many people use it as a sleep aid. It is not your friend alcohol. Again, is a sedative
3:36
Oh, it knocks you out. The second is that it fragments your sleep, so you wake up. Your sleep is littered with all of these small Awakenings. Most of them, you don't remember because there's two brief, but it makes them miserable lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that it alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep with your dream sleep, which we know is critical for many other functions as well. So alcohol is not your friend. That's the sort of the final tip again. You know. Just every if you're with friends have a glass of red wine, just know. Okay. -
4:06
Sleeps not going to be great. Thank you, Madison.
4:08
Yeah, I think I'm joking. Yeah, I'm not. Yeah, I'm
4:13
whatever it is just, you know, live life to, of course, you know, I'm not saying
4:16
that I was, I was thinking there about the other sort of Behavioral things that we do that harm, our sleep as well. We talked about coffee earlier, on avoiding that, it's weird that people drink after dessert in the evenings, never understood that. Guess that's an old tradition that the other thing, obviously that the modern generation or even more susceptible to is to have a quick tick-tock.
4:36
Look at the social media account or something. And I thought, you know, there's a lot of different products out there that are trying to help with the the light that comes from these greens that I think is the cause of what's keeping us awake, but there's this little button called Dark mode on my iPad. There's also one called night shift, so if I just pop that on Bob's, your uncle and this time I can crack on with my screen time, true or false?
5:03
Partly true. Oh good. Okay, Polly. So I can just pop that on night mode and dark mode and then I can carry on using iPad, partly true.
5:12
So, it turns out that the blue light from screens does have an impact on sleeps as a great study done by Harvard Medical School by some colleagues there. And they showed that reading for an hour on an iPad just before bed relative to just reading a book in dim light, firstly, it delayed the time with, which people fell asleep. So it took them
5:33
Longer to fall asleep. Second it reduced. The total amount of sleep that they had third it decreased asleep related hormone called, melatonin it delayed, the release of that melatonin and it reduced the amount of melatonin and finally it reduced the amount of rapid eye movement sleep. So
5:50
it has significantly significant amount of Turning Point hi-yah significantly. So it delayed the release by about somewhere between 90 minutes to two hours across the individuals. So, in other words, your brain was so what melatonin does it's a
6:03
It's called the hormone of Darkness of the vampire hormone, just because not because it makes you want to bite into people's necks because it signals to your brain that it's nighttime, then it's darkness. And so your brain needs the signal of melatonin for it to understand. When is it dark? In other words, it needs to understand by way of melatonin when it is time to fall asleep. And when you're bathed in electric light at night, and especially when you're getting blue light from these devices, your brain is fooled into thinking.
6:33
It's still daytime. And when there is light, emitting through your retina, coming into your brain, it's signals to a part of your brain to hit the brakes on melatonin and your brain will not release melatonin. So what was happening with this iPad reading is that you are artificially telling the brain, it's still daytime. And the brakes on melatonin was still shut on. And so melatonin was not starting to be released until much later. And what was it? Also, interesting about the study. By the way, is that when they stopped the
7:03
The iPad reading the Sleep disrupted pattern continued for several days later. In other words, it was almost like a drug that it had a washout period that was a blast radius to it. Now there's been some great work by a wonderful sleep scientist in Australia. Michael graders are and he is added to this story and he said, it's not just the blue light, these devices, the principal function of these devices as that they are attention capture devices. Just like you said, I'm just going to have a wheel
7:33
Tick-Tock before bed. They are in the attention economy and all they care about is capturing your attention for a current currency and they make a lot of money from it. What that attention does is that it stimulates your brain and when your brain is stimulated, it's very difficult for you to fall asleep. And it creates what we call Sleep procrastination, where you're lying in bed and you could be perfectly sleepy and you could fall asleep right now. But then you sort of check social media me.
8:03
Thing. Oh I'll just shoot that last e-mail on an order that last thing on to the you know, Amazon and then you get a text back from your friend and you start texting them and then you look up and it's now an hour later and you're an hour deficient on sleep. So it's the activation of your cerebral cortex by these devices. That is, perhaps the more harmful aspect of them regarding your sleep. Now here again, I don't want to be finger-wagging, you know, the genie of Technology.
8:33
He's out the bottle and it's not going back in anytime soon. There's nothing that I'm going to say as a sleep researcher. That's going to change that. I don't take my phone into my bedroom. I put my phone out in the kitchen. I don't see it until morning, but lots of people do and fair enough. But there's another rule that I've stolen from another friend called Michael grandmother, who's here in America, at the University of Tucson, in Arizona, he has this Great rule regarding technology.
9:03
And it's the following that if you really must take your phone into your bedroom, you can only use it.
9:10
Standing up. And what you'll find is that after about six or seven minutes standing up, you think just going to? I'm just going to sit down on the bed and at that point, as soon as your backside hits the bed, you're done, you've got to put the phone away. I think it's a great rule of thumb. If you're need to take technology in the
9:26
bedroom, I have some breaking news. And though this is an emergency, I've spent the last two years writing a book and I've written 33 laws for business marketing and
9:40
If that derive from all of these conversations I've had here, I traveled the world to write this book. I interviewed some of the most incredible people. I did six months of extensive research on scientific studies, and principles to corroborate everything that I wrote into these 33 laws and ladies and gentlemen, that book called The Diary of a CEO, the 33 laws for business, marketing and life
10:07
Is now available for pre-order and there are 5,000 only 5000 signed copies.
10:18
And its first come first, serve. The link is in the bayou right now. If you want that book, honestly, it's the best book I've ever written. Is the book. I always should have written. It's the book. I also wish someone had written for me when I was starting out in my career.
10:31
I'm really proud of it. I'm really really proud of it really, really proud of it. And I can't wait for all of you to get to read it. It's out in August. I couldn't be more excited about this as you can probably tell. I don't know what to set to say other than the words, I've said to emphasize my excitement, because I think it's important and I think it's really valuable Link in the description.
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